Finance and Financial Considerations

The Finance Department, as one of the major core business functions, needs to be consulted as part of any review of Business and Community Engagement.

It will be necessary to identify how Business and Community Engagement activities are resourced internally in addition to how income streams from such activities are dealt with. The nature of services provided by the central Finance Department must be identified, together with the sources of such functions if not provided by the central department. These could be services such as assistance with costing, invoicing, payment for goods and services to the university, release of funding to other budgets as required from central or external funding sources, control and audit functions and financial reporting mechanisms.

The use of any standards or constraints around the costing of services should be tested to ensure that there is both a structure to follow to enable a consistent approach and yet some flexibility to cater for circumstances that may only arise in a Business and Community Engagement context. Examples of these found during the Embedding BCE project included:

• the desire to offer a new product or service on either a cost-only basis or a loss-leader basis. The latter is where a new service is offered to customers at a lower-than-cost basis as a tester, to stimulate interest and future take-up of the product at a healthier rate. This is a well known approach in the commercial sector, but is not common at all in the education sector and is likely to challenge the culture within most finance departments.
• the ability to offer deferred payment schemes
• the ability to offer payment by instalment schemes

In some cases, the policies and financial regulations of an institution must be examined to determine if such approaches are possible - with a consequent evaluation of amendment if current regulations do not allow them.

The Embedding BCE project found evidence that the instigation of such exceptions to the norm, in at least one institutional partner, required the approval of a senior member of staff and it would seem a prudent approach that would not allow such approaches to become simply the norm.